Good teaching, writes Smithsonian curator Dennis O’Toole in this Art to Zoo, “is the ability to get student to see the old as new and the new as old. . . . It is the capacity to get students to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, the known in the unknown: to understand what they see.”

There is no better place for this instruction, O’Toole says, than a museum, with its objects that are “always the real thing.” He presents a lesson plan in which students take on the work of museum professionals: each student creates a “Museum of Me” and the entire class builds exhibition on a subject relevant to the curriculum.

The issue also includes an article on student filmmaking.

Note: This is an archival publication dating back to 1978 and any supplements or suggestions for off-site education may not be available.